Dumpster Ethos

Corbin Louis

The dumpster! The dumpster was full! Dumpster full of pill bottle relapse, seventeen nights of December spent cocaine rage for the fuel of dreams. My friends and I. We were and are high. (Stoned). Galactic. Getting footage of road trips and swapping stories about blowjob missions. Everything in a man’s life is a blowjob mission. And guitars. No pick, extra long fingernail and eight ball of nightmares. My ex-girlfriends are dead angels with petrified faces and switchblades sticking out of their mouths. I have a razor for every week I loved. Empty heart valley of scar tissue. Just please for the love of god let me get high and laid and brain damage neurotic from the car commercials I won’t stop watching. Mom told me stop. I said no. Pills are my favorite.

The dumpster was a redux. Everything we filled our lives with was then put out into the dumpster and recycled back into the trash heap of our hearts. I threw out CDs. Then bought an iPod. Threw out the iPod for an iPhone. Now I throw wav files into the gates of heaven, 350 windows rolled down and music about devils. The metal strings of a capitalist guitar. Good strong American music that taught us to suicide. My redneck friends. My heroin boys. My daughters of war. This country has made me an empty vase full of so many gas stations. And I have become a pill. I have become a loosey and a swig of gin in the backseat of Tim’s Subaru.

Dumpster of heaven. Take me there. Take me to the Alabama nothing back street funeral of friends I let die. Trust. When I relapse I am forgiven by the best. 26-year-old guardians that have grown into obelisks. Nobody knows better than me. That life is a metronome made of switchblades. And a girlfriend that will put her tongue anywhere I want. So put it into my liver. Put it into my mistakes and crucify me for the ways I want to keep you. Locked up in a trunk full of gasoline.

In the end we will die in a dumpster and be taken out to the Staten Island junkyard by massive ferryboats made of wax. This is where our burials lay. Hundred-foot-tall pyres infested with crows. Every one of my friends will be commemorated with a giant torn up American flag and sky scrappers made of Mountain Dew bottles. Plastic funeral. Jesus’s name inscribed on our cocaine eulogies. There is no reason to die sober. Everything is bullets, pussy and alcohol.